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Start giftingI Am Charlotte Simmons - Abridged
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn more2005 Audie Award Finalist
America's "peerless observer" (People) uncovers college life—from jocks to mutants, dormcest to tailgating—plus race, class, sex, and basketball
Dupont University—the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition...Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from North Carolina, who has come here on full scholarship. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that for the uppercrust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump academic achievement every time.
As Charlotte encounters Dupont's privileged elite—her roommate, Beverly, a fleshy, Groton-educated Brahmin in lusty pursuit of lacrosse players; Jojo Johanssen, the only white starting player on Dupont's godlike basketball team, whose position is threatened by a hotshot black freshman from the projects; the Young Turn of Saint Ray fraternity, Hoyt Thorpe, whose heady sense of entitlement and social domination is clinched by his accidental brawl with a bodyguard for the governor of California; and Adam Geller, one of the Millennial Mutants who run the university's "independent" newspaper and who consider themselves the last bastion of intellectual endeavor on the sex-crazed, jock- obsessed campus—she gains a new, revelatory sense of her own power, that of her difference and of her very innocence, but little does she realize that she will act as a catalyst in all of their lives.
With his signature eye for detail, Tom Wolfe draws on extensive observation of campuses across the country to immortalize college life in the ‘00s. I Am Charlotte Simmons is the much-anticipated triumph of America's master chronicler.
Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) was one of the founders of the New Journalism movement and the author of such contemporary classics as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, as well as the novels The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. As a reporter, he wrote articles for The Washington Post, the New York Herald Tribune, Esquire, and New York magazine, and is credited with coining the term, “The Me Decade.”
Among his many honors, Tom was awarded the National Book Award, the John Dos Passos Award, the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence, the National Humanities Medal, and National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
A native of Richmond, Virginia, he earned his B.A. at Washington and Lee University, graduating cum laude, and a Ph.D. in American studies at Yale. He lived in New York City.
Dylan Baker’s first audiobook recording was for The Grapes of Wrath, which subsequently won both Audie and Earphones Awards. He has since narrated several audio books, including Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, and Michael Lewis’s Flash Boys. In 2002, he won an Audie Award for Abridged Fiction for Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.
He has appeared in numerous films including Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3, Kinsey, Head of State, Thirteen Days, and Happiness. Baker was nominated for a Tony Award for his Broadway performance in La Bete, and he won an Obie Award for his performance in the 1986 play Not About Heroes. His television credits include guest appearances on The Practice, Law & Order, and The West Wing. Baker earned his B.F.A. from Southern Methodist University and a Masters in Fine Arts from Yale's School of Drama.
Reviews
“Our pre-eminent social realist...trains his all-seeing eye on the institution of the American university. . . . Wolfe's rhapsodic prose style finds its perfect target in academia's beer-soaked bacchanals.” —Henry Alford, Newsday
“Wolfe is one of the greatest literary stylists and social observers of our much observed postmodern era. . . . A rich, wise, absorbing, and irresistible novel.” —Lev Grossman, Time
“Tom Wolfe has scored a slam dunk with his...attention to style, the rule-bending punctuation, the deftness of slang dialogue, and that biting satire.” —Steve Garbarino, New York Post
“Wolfe's dialogue is some of the finest in literature, not just fast but deep. He hears the cacophony of our modern lives.” —Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
“[A] hilarious, exclamation-point filled novel.” —John Freeman, Time Out New York
“Brilliant . . . I couldn't stop reading it. . . . Tom Wolfe can make words dance and sing and perform circus tricks, he can make the reader sigh with pleasure.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
“A lot of fun . . . Hilarious.” —Francine Prose, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Tom Wolfe remains a peerless satirist. Alone among our fiction writers he is actively writing the human comedy, American-style, on a grand Dickensian scale.” —David Lehman, Bloomberg News
“Scathingly clear-eyed, often very funny take on college life.” —Robert Siegel, NPR, All Things Considered
“Dazzingly vivid . . . Tom Wolfe has served up another of his broadly entertaining novels.” —Adam Begley, The New York Observer
“His most fully realized and hands-down funniest work of fiction.” —Patrick Beach, Austin American-Statesman
“Captivating . . . Sit back and enjoy the ride.” —Tom Walker, The Denver Post
“Tom Wolfe is America's greatest living novelist.” —Joseph Bottum, The Weekly Standard
“Rollicking . . . Just as Americans continue to read A Farewell to Arms or The Great Gatsby, we'll be reading I Am Charlotte Simmons for many years. . . . Professors like to complain that they get a year older every fall, while students always remain the same. Add I Am Charlotte Simmons to that magic circle of campus phenomena unlikely to age.” —Carlin Romano, The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Wolfe leaves no head unbashed . . . His eye and ear for detailed observation are incomparable; and observation is to the satirist what bullets are to a gun.” —The Boston Sunday Globe on Bonfire of the Vanities
“Human comedy, on a skyscraper scale and at a taxi-meter pace.” —Newsweek on Bonfire of the Vanities
“Richly entertaining . . . A superb human comedy and the first novel ever to get contemporary New York, in all its arrogance and shame and heterogeneity and insularity, exactly right.” —Washington Post Book World on Bonfire of the Vanities
“This novel contains passages as powerful and as beautiful as anything written--not merely by contemporary American novelists but by any American novelist.... The book is as funny as anything Wolfe has ever written; at the same time it is also deeply, strangely affecting.” —The New York Times Book Review on A Man in Full
“Wolfe is a genius in full.” —People on A Man in Full
“Superior...utterly engrossing.” —USA Today on A Man in Full